


blackberry

by inkspl0tches



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Cancer Arc, F/M, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, not as dark...as these tags make it sound, post-memento mori, post-never again
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-26
Updated: 2018-08-26
Packaged: 2019-07-02 21:33:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15805002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkspl0tches/pseuds/inkspl0tches
Summary: He sometimes forgets. Well, not since Philadelphia, but he used to–He forgets that Scully is not his imaginary friend. That she is not his Bruce Willis. His own private haunting. I see Dana Scully.The twist is that so does everyone else. And it gets him every single time.--prompt from @o6666666 on tumblr: some guy lunges for mulder, but scully gets in the way. and gets a black eye. and mulder goes APESHIT.





	blackberry

The bar has been exclusively playing Boston for the past hour. It’s not why he hates it, exactly, but it’s not helping. His forearms stick–sweat, spilled beer, suspicious substances, whatever–uncomfortably on the leather edge of the stand-up, and he drops his head to them with a groan.

To his right, with her legs crossed away from him and her black suit jacket on but sliding so far down into the crease of her elbow it’s mostly off, Scully pinches the bridge of her nose between her old-bruise nails. An unnatural yellow/blue underneath chipping clear polish. On her pointer finger, the nail runs in a jagged line, a cruel little smile. It’s the chemo–the chemo that makes her fingers look perpetually frostbitten, preemptively zombified.

Probably, they should leave. Probably, he should hook his finger in the sagging collar of her black blazer and help it up over her shoulders, ignoring the way she stiffens a little. But probably, she didn’t have to come with him in the first place. Wasn’t that what the tattoo was about? A month ago? Two? Her not-following him? Her being able to pick her own shitty bars and order her own gin and tonic? Her shrugging on her own coats?

It’s not that he’s been thinking about it. A lot. It’s just that on this case, on this case, this case in such a stupid, unnecessary little end of Ohio it was practically West Virginia, if it was anything. On this case, three of the five officers on the local force had applauded when Scully came in the door.  _A lady fed, alright!_ And she had worn her scrubs with the longer sleeves, and the hairnet, and he knew what it all meant. And it was fine. It was none of his business. It’s just.

He sometimes forgets. Well, not since Philadelphia, but he used to–He forgets that Scully is not his imaginary friend. That she is not his Bruce Willis. His own private haunting.  _I see Dana Scully._

The twist is that so does everyone else. And it gets him every single time.

–

The door rings as it opens. It is an ugly little convenience store jingle, and he thinks at first it is part of the song. His favorite fraction of the local force filters through, and he rolls his eyes.

Officer Henderson leads the pack. He has a square, yellow head and little white tic-tac teeth in pink gums, and at twelve, thirteen, had definitely made a point of picking the smallest boys last for pick-up baseball even though he wasn’t even good at pick-up baseball. He had gotten a BB gun for his birthday, sworn he would only shoot at cans, and then immediately killed between three to four squirrels, shot out the window of his sister’s playhouse.

Scully sucks loudly on her straw so the ice in the bottom of her cup crackles. “Profiling the local police force is not your most amusing party trick, Mulder.”

“I know. My rundown of BSG episodes ranked by hottest alien race is infinitely better. But I’m saving it for dinner next month with your mom.”  

Scully makes her face that means _Cute!_  when whatever he said wasn’t. It’s been three days of a heat that presses down with an almost sentient purpose, and she’s wearing a tank-top kind of blouse, the same blue color as her autopsy scrubs. The tops of her shoulders are freckled. 

She says, “I once killed a snake with a BB gun.“

He knows that. He also knows she had cried, but he doesn’t say this. He nods like this had been his point all along. "Exactly. So you two would get along great. You could start a whole empire. Dana and…Chad’s BB Gun Hunting Emporium.”

“His name is not  _Chad_.”

“Fine. What’s his name.”

“I don’t know.” Scully shrugs, looks over at where the little mass of local force has settled a stool or two down. She’s grinning when she looks back. “Vodka Cranberry.”

“What? What were the names of your dolls as a kid–Heineken and Coors Lite?”

“No.” She’s uncrossed her legs and leans towards him, elbows on the sticky bar. “Officer Henderson is drinking a vodka cranberry.”  

“Agent Scully.” His tone verges on fucking delighted. “Are you  _making fun_ of an officer on the local task force?”

He twists towards her on the stool so she has to turn and mirror him. So she has to lift her arms off the grimy bar and put her hands in her lap. The white underside of her, from wrist to elbow, is muddy with bruises. The delicate ley lines of needles and IVs. He forgets, for a moment, what they were talking about.  _Scully, Scully,_ he thinks.  _When are you going to admit it’s all too fucking much._

Scully wrinkles her nose, trying to capture the last dredges of ice in her cup. She lifts her eyebrow, oblivious. “ _Never_ , Agent Mulder.”

–

And okay. 

It’s not that he thinks Officer Vodka Cranberry was trying to sock him. 

He’s not sure if even Officer Vodka Cranberry thought he was trying to sock him. But how was he supposed to know the guy was such a big  _Boston_  fan? That he had a pocket full of quarters and intended to feed the juke until it puked up a silvery copper alloy to the tune of “More Than A Feeling”? That his mocking dig at the music of choice at Officer Vodka Cranberry’s bar of choice was going to be the end of a thrilling discussion that had started with Henderson’s delighted cry:  _It’s the lady fed! Alright!_

Anyway. Henderson had shifted over to the stool next to Scully, who was exercising her off-duty privileges and pointedly ignoring him. He and Mulder lobbed stupid, jockstrap, boyish bullshit over her head.

And Mulder’s not even talking to him when he says it, though he’s been gamely provoking the kid for the better part of half an hour. He’s not even talking to him when he exclaims, to practically no one, that if he hears another _Boston_ song he’s going to burn the bar down. 

And with almost no warning–just a strangled  _I really don’t fucking like you, man_ –Henderson absolutely  _goes_  for it. Just does a sort of half-lunge, a fraction of a football tackle which gets him immediately tangled up in the barstool. His hand pressed into a perfectly compact square fist.

And Scully, fed up but mostly just looking tired, turns away from Mulder to begin her usual careful extraction of condescending apologies and to shrug on her own goddamn coat.

And that is how Officer Vodka Cranberry’s square fist greets Agent Scully, Lady Fed’s face very politely. Just a  _Hello_.

Just a  _How are you_ , really.

It’s more of an accident than a fully delivered blow. But it is  _Scully_ –his Scully, who had come back from Philadelphia with bruises on her neck and hips and ribs and. It is Scully who makes a stunned little noise, a kind of inverse hiccup. It is Scully, and she stumbles back into Mulder as his bar stool hits the floor with a hollow metal reverb.

The song ends. The whole bar hears the jukebox click over.  

“Scul- _ly_.”

He spins her a little on her heel, to face him, turns his back to Officer Dumb as a Fucking Rock and tries unsuccessfully to peel her fingers away from one side of her face, his thumb at the corner of her mouth.

“It’s fine. Mulder. It’s fine.”  

“Agent Scully, I am so, so–I’m such an idiot–”

Tilting her head away from his hands, the arch of her neck is _obscene_. “It’s fine, Officer Henderson.”

“It’s not  _fine_.” Mulder twists around. His hand slides awkwardly against Scully’s hair, which is the only reason he hasn’t smashed chagrined Officer Henderson’s chagrined face into a chagrined pulp. “It’s not fucking  _fine_. You’re a fucking asshole, you know that? I should…I should fucking kill you.”  

Scully, dazed and embarrassed, still blinking hard, puts a cool hand on his forearm to turn him around. “Mulder.”

He looks back at her. “I should fucking kill him, Scully.”

“You should stop making threats to a  _local_ officers safety in a  _local_  bar on a case that’s been making the national news every evening.” She grins a little, a strained twist of her mouth–but it’s not funny, Scully, not when it’s  _you_ –that he feels under his thumb. “You should stop making your controversial opinions on  _Boston_  public.”  

“I should–move your hand a little.” His thumbs low on her cheeks, his fingers in her hair, nearly touching at the base of her skull. He imagines this is the way it would go with some of the alternate healers he’d looked up in the past week, two. There was a woman out in Annapolis, some ex-chiropractor, who swore up and down she could mold a cancer from the outside, shrink it down to size with lavender oil and her palms pressed hard over the spot.

As if to highlight his sweet-stupid magical thinking, a rivulet of blood slips down from under Scully’s palm. And oh, oh. It’s so not fucking fine.

She sniffs, seeing his face. “It’s from getting hit, Mulder. It’s not.” Her voice is nasally and rough, but calm. “It’s not…that.”

 _That._  How can she tell the difference? He looks closely at the little line of blood, scrunching up bar napkins dabbing them in the place between the suction cup of her palm and her upper lip. Could she tell the difference in Philadelphia? Had she already–

“Here,” Behind them, Officer Vodka Cranberry is holding out a little shot of clear liquor. “On me. I’m sorry. It’ll help with the headache.” 

Mulder nearly sneers. A Scully who self-medicates. Thank you so much, doctor. He has Tylenol in his black bag, at the mote, and he knows Scully has something stronger in those orange prescription bottles she doesn’t like to let him see.

Under his hand, still palm open on the back of her head, he feels Scully nod– _nod?_  Nod. Nod and then dip in a practiced little sinusoidal motion, up down, as she takes the shot.  _Okay._ He drops his hand to the base of her neck, a little half moon shape around her collar with his curled fingers. The jukebox clicks back on. It’s  _Journey_. Christ.

He bets the bar Scully had gone to Philadelphia had played  _The Ramones_. Had played  _The Pretenders_  and  _The Clash_.

–

Scully comes out of the bar a few steps behind him. She holds the door open for him, actually. He can pretend it’s the scientist in her that makes her feel like she’s always got something to fucking  _prove_.

When he turns at the car, the open sign has turned her a brackish blue. She has one pale hand over her left eye like a pirate patch, and steps with careful confidence, trusting her limited periphery as she picks her way to the car. Scully has no idea–and he’s not gonna tell her–but sometimes, she is not Starbuck. Sometimes, like now, when they are drifting into unfamiliar waters, when she goes to Philadelphia, when she sits in soft chairs on Friday afternoons and watches a thin little drip of poison, she’s Ahab. And she expects that no one will mention the peg leg, even as it drives them over the edge of the world.

And him? He just looks dumbly where she points. He’s not even the first mate. He’s a hired hand. He straightens all the maps but doesn’t know how to read them.

–

In the car: “Fucking asshole. I’ll break both his..both his elbows, I swear to god.”

She snorts. “His elbows.”  

“Arms. Legs. His fucking  _mandible_ , Scully. Whatever. I’m gonna kill him.”

As she buckles her seatbelt, he gets a split-second look at her left eye, the whites gone red in amidst a purpling landscape.

“If you break the thoracic vertebrae his spine, he’ll be paralyzed. He’ll have to piss in a bag.”

He feels a shot of love as close to anger as this shit town is to the West Virginia line. So tight and twinned together that if you drove without patience, without real care, you would cross over the state line and not even notice. The difference is almost negligible, between here and there. But still, between states, the Appalachian mountains grow. They ripple. 

They jag and they catch and they change.

–

Scully laid out on the slick maroon bedspread in her blue tank top and black slacks. His elbow dips the bed and shifts her towards him. He hovers.

Quietly: “Let me see your eye.”

She blinks at him with the one she isn’t covering, purses her lips petulantly. “You are seeing it.”

“Scully.”

The clear liquor was vodka. He can smell it on her. Its sharp, clear tang like water gone bad. She rolls her head against the bed to look up at him. He covers her hand with his, running the pad of his finger over her broken nail to feel the catch. “Let me see you, okay?”

Scully pulls her hand away from her face and drops it on the bed without ceremony. There is no particular reason for this–this her dropping away her impromptu patch, her letting him see–to choke him up. He knows there isn’t.

Still.

“Oh, Scully.”

“It’s fine.” She gestures vaguely with her other hand. “Some ice. It’ll be fine.”

“It looks terrible.” He makes a low, involuntary sound through his teeth. “Reminds me of that nursery rhyme: black eye, pick a pie–”

“It is not  _black_ ,” she interrupts.

“Are you familiar with what a blackberry looks like when it’s absolutely  _decimated,_  Doctor Scully? Because that’s about what we’re seeing here.”

She scoffs. “Doesn’t matter.”

He blinks, but she’s already grinning. A wide smile, unlike her. One that makes him tip an imagined hat to good old G&Ts. “Rick was  _ver-y_  suspicious, watching us come in. With my hand over my eye.”

The ice he’d gotten on their way in was already going watery at the bottom of the plastic container. He doubles up a threadbare little hand towel from the bathroom, the white threads pilling in the center, and scoops up a handful. It smells like cheap bulk detergent and Scully’s leftover perfume from this morning.

“Mm. Who’s Rick.” Tilting the bed again on his elbows. The cold on her blackberry pie face makes Scully hiss and grab at his wrist.

“Uh. At the front desk. With the hair. He was looking at us when we came in.”

He’d forgotten this earlier: Scully always, always reads the nametags.

“Scully. What’s Officer Henderson’s real first name?”

She swallows. Her visible eye blinks. “Jonathan.”

Mulder shakes his head. Of course she knew. She always knows. “Why’d you tell me you didn’t know?”

She tries to turn her head toward him, tilting the makeshift ice pack precariously, and he shakes his head. From the side, her close-mouthed little smile dents her swollen cheek. Looks curious and small and sad.

Suddenly, she laughs. A high, manic sound. Like the idea, she’s about to put forward is so absurd it makes her giddy. “Rick probably thought _you_  hit me. Can you believe that.”

When Scully had come back from Philadelphia, here is what he’d thought:  _So that’s what you want?_ And it’s not like he hadn’t thought about it before. But for days afterward, when they’d eventually eased their way back into petty little spats over cases and slides, he’d  _wondered_. Would it be a betrayal if he pressed her back against the file cabinets? Would she slap him if he shoved her against their closed door, and if he already knew the sound it would make when her hard little head fell against it–it would be hollow, hollow, hollow.

“No,” he says. “No, I can’t.”

“Mmm. Me either.” Scully sighs sweetly, like she’s falling asleep, and it moves through her whole body. Through her shirt, her ribs dent the fabric in shallow dips and crests. “Not for a second.”

–

The motel room goes muddy violet through the curtains. It had already been late verging on early when they drove back from the bar. He can never sleep when he’s even a little drunk, waking up dizzy in little gasps. He doesn’t think Scully does either. She hadn’t moved to take the ice from him, and she hadn’t told him to stop. So he’d stayed, still denting the bed. In his white Oxford and black shoes.

“Hey.” He nudges her knee with his and she hums. “Why doesn’t it matter?”

Her voice sounds tacky, low. “Why doesn’t what matter, Mulder.”

“Your eye. You said it didn’t matter.”

Scully moves her hand slowly back up to his wrist, pulling it away from her face. The towel is just wet linen now, a clammy laundromat relic. For the first time since they got back, she rolls over to face him. Fixes him with her mismatched little stare and stays quiet. He’s a moron but he’s not fucking stupid. Scully blinks and she know she means:  _Because when I die, I will be violet and blue and cold all over_. She means, _My mother will buy the make-up but you’ll tell her what kind because you’ve shared bathrooms and beds with me and because ever since Philadelphia I’ve carried little black and tan compacts around like some people carry gum._

And in a way, looking at her, he knows already. The whole of it. But he wants to  _know_.

“Scully. Was Jerse…rough with you?

She stiffens, rolls back onto her straightened spine. “You saw all the pictures. You came to the hospital.”

“Not in the basement.” When he swallows it tastes like copper. Like the tin mouth of a jukebox.  “Before that.”

Scully’s eye is so swollen that if she cried no one would be able to tell. The skin there is shiny. It would keep her secret safe.  

_Did you ask him to hurt you, Scully? Did you know already, Scully?_

Scully shakes her head, even though he hasn’t said anything. “Mulder.”

At some point, he’d realized he loved Scully like he’d never loved anyone else. And in certain lights, he thinks that might mean it is the purest, most singular adoration he has ever felt. And in others, it just means he has nothing to put it up against. No directions as to what to fucking do with it.

“Forget it.”

She rolls toward him again. He can feel the fight go out of her back and shoulder. She curves up like a comma. “Tell me the rest of the nursery rhyme.”

There’s not a name for it, but this is the same as when she had pretended not to know Officer Henderson’s name. It’s a give. It’s a leniency in her, somewhere, but he’s never able to find the source. Can’t ever press the right spot. He thinks of the healer in Annapolis. The lavender oil and warm palms. He is such a fuck up.  

Without rhythm: “Green eye, greedy gut. Eat the whole world up.”

“Hmm.” They are whispering for no reason. “I don’t think I could. Eat up the whole world.” 

Lavender oil, warm palms. He would do anything, anything.

“Because.” He hadn’t asked anything, but Scully’s voice wavers, goes a willowy and thin. “I feel… so sick, Mulder,” she says. “All the time.”

“Scully,” he says.

His fingers are numb from the ice, still, and he replaces it with his fingertips, just under where the bruise starts. On the Ohio/West Virginia line of her orbital bone. She blinks and he feels her cry, rather than sees. 

He thinks about her in the hospital, after Philadelphia, last month. The smear of her hair on white pillows. The way it never gets easier, the way he never learns to slip and roll with the sucker punch of it. How it is always like looking through the wrong end of the telescope or fainting, but very, very slow. A cinemascope, a very dramatic, very real little insular collapse of  _something_. There is Scully, then the world. There is Scully and then there is Scully, Scully, Scully–

“You could,” he says.  _You already have._  “You could.”

 


End file.
